


The Day She Couldn’t Forget

by salienne



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Episode: s03e13 Last of the Time Lords
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-09-12
Updated: 2007-09-12
Packaged: 2017-10-22 14:18:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/238939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/salienne/pseuds/salienne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Most days during the Year That Never Was, Martha is able to keep going--she doesn’t think about the way life used to be or the horrors she has witnessed. But some days, focusing on abstract facts doesn’t work. Some days, she just has to stop.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Day She Couldn’t Forget

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [](http://telling-a-story.livejournal.com/profile)[**telling_a_story**](http://telling-a-story.livejournal.com/). A day in the Life of Martha Jones during the Year That Never Was.
> 
>  **Date Chosen:** April 27
> 
> Special thanks to [](http://kwizbit.livejournal.com/profile)[**kwizbit**](http://kwizbit.livejournal.com/) for betaing!

Today was the day Martha Jones forgot all the bones in the human hand.

She was weaving through the oaks and pines of what was once the United States-Canada border, doing her best to avoid roots, bushes, and the periodic fallen tree trunks and scattered rocks. To distract herself, and in the off chance that her exams would ever become anything more than a distant dream, she was reviewing something familiar, something that should have been simple. The hand. Carpal bones, the proximal road, came first: scaphoid, lunate, triquetrum, pisiform. Then the distal road: trapezium, trapezoid…

Then she got stuck.

Martha frowned, ducking under a tree branch, and went through it again. Carpal bones, proximal road: scaphoid, lunate, triquetrum, pisiform. Carpal bones, distal road: trapezium, trapezoid, and then… c-something, d-something? Then… then hamate, yes hamate, but what came before?

“Come on,” she muttered, her voice almost lost under the crunch of dirt and broken pine branches underfoot. This was easy, this was the _first_ thing that had come to mind back when she had wanted to prove herself to Nurse Redfern; this was second nature. Just a week ago, she’d been able to recite the words like an incantation, a spell that, even if it wouldn’t get her and the rest of humanity out of this hell, could distract her and ground her in a past without the Master. The recitation gave her real, tangible hope of something that, maybe, she would have again one day.

Now, she didn’t even have that.

Groaning low in her throat, Martha tried naming the bones again, this time murmuring quietly to herself. Again, she couldn’t remember. Again, and again, and again, she got stuck on trapezoid, again and again, she couldn’t get past that mental block, again and again, she forgot, and with each failure, she became more and more aware of just how much time had passed since the Master came to power. And then, it was just too much. Crying out, she slammed her hand into a nearby tree trunk, her breath coming in angry huffs, her heart pounding. Closing her eyes, she collapsed sideways onto the tree, feeling the cold and the rough beneath her fingers and arm but ignoring it. This was too much.

Doing her best to compose herself, she forced herself to take long, deep breaths. That was what you were supposed to do when it all caught up to you, wasn’t it? Take deep breaths? She’d been trained in calming and aiding other people, panicking patients and the like, but not herself, never herself. She had always just… dealt, with divorcing parents, a racist professor, a brother and sister who screamed at each other instead of at their father, friends who called her at 4 AM in tears. For the past ten months, with very few exceptions, Martha had dealt, reciting muscle groups, operating procedures, and the components of blood. Cold, familiar facts had kept her sane.

Now, she couldn’t even remember the bones of the human hand.

Beneath her palm, the bark was rough and cold, like crinkled stone, and with her hand pressed into it, she almost wished she’d get cut, just so she’d have something to treat, something to focus on besides the images that were now flooding her mind. That mass grave in what was once Russia, forgotten even by the Toclefane, the piled bodies hard and frostbitten; the Master, during his last televised appearance months ago, torturing Jack and making her family and the Doctor watch, all for her benefit; the Doctor, aged but not beaten, _not beaten_ she kept telling herself, not beaten and sending her out there; and the young woman she’d been unable to save just the other day because she didn’t have the equipment and she didn’t have the time and because she was Martha Jones. The famous Martha Jones, and she couldn’t save one girl.

Out of everything she had seen and everything she had experienced, for some reason that last image stayed with her. Maybe it was how close she’d been to the blood, maybe it was how little time had passed since her death, or maybe it was just because that girl was such a perfect example of just how useless Martha felt sometimes, but for whatever reason, she could still smell the sweat and gunpowder, she could still feel the hot blood and the slack mouth beneath her lips as she vainly gave CPR.

Martha believed in the Doctor, yes, she loved him, she was in awe of him, and she knew that he could save them, but how? He was a time traveler, yeah, but he’d told her repeatedly how he couldn’t just go around changing history; how could he reverse the millions, perhaps billions, of lives that had been lost?

Usually, Martha didn’t let herself sink into these sorts of thoughts. She distracted herself, or she held onto the small victories she’d been party to—children who made it to shelter, a man whose leg she’d set, even a baby she’d helped deliver and the look of relief and wonder and joy on the mother’s face. If only she could focus on that now. If only her mind wasn’t consumed by the thought of that girl from three days ago, the girl who didn’t even get killed by a Toclefane, the girl who got shot down by a fellow human.

It was right after one of Martha’s talks, in one of the overcrowded shelters most of the Earth’s citizens were crammed into nightly. She was going upstairs at the time, forced into the only room with a bed even if she refused to sleep on it, when the disturbance started.

“That’s it, I’m going, I’m going out _right now_ and shooting every last one o’ those bastards!”

At the top of the stairs, Martha stopped and looked back down the way she had come. To both sides was the wall, so she couldn’t exactly peek over the railing, but apparently, looking down didn’t do her much good either. She could only make out bits of the landing and a bunch of heads. Ignoring the protests of those around her, she made her way back down the stairs.

About halfway down, when she could almost glance beneath the wall, the man was yelling again.

“You heard what she said,” the man screamed. “She’s no-she’s no hero, it’s all this _doctor_ , this _doctor_ , an’ she wants us to _think_ about him? How’s that gonna help? How!” Martha had reached the floor now, and ignoring the press of the crowd, the suspicious stares she was starting to receive, and the “You’re wrong!” someone somewhere shouted, she made her way to the next room, to the doorway so many people were pressing into. For the first time in so long, she was scared and it wasn’t because of the Master. “An’ you know, I don’t care,” the man continued. “It doesn’t matter. Because I, _I’m_ going after those fucking orbs myself even if it kills me, _I’m_ gonna do something, ‘cause someone has to an’ it’s clearly not gonna be _Martha Jones_!”

As Martha moved forward, the crowd contracted before her like a coil, springing apart the moment a head or an eye angled her way. Had she been moving faster, she might’ve stumbled at the wave-like motion.

“Alec, this is insane,” someone was saying, and if Martha had still been on the stairs, she never would have heard it. “Shooting”—and at that word she felt something inside her freeze because she hadn’t known he had a gun—“doesn’t _work_ , you’ll get us all killed!”

“We’re all gonna die anyway! What does it matter?”

“No one’s gonna die.”

Martha stood at the head of the crowd now, her palms outstretched. From the cabinets and old fridge she spotted from the doorway, she assumed this was once the kitchen. And along the wall to her right was the man with the gun. A half-circle had formed around him, the empty space stunning in a house so full of people, but nothing was so alarming as the man himself, as the way he was brandishing the firearm at his fellow humans. It was like he wouldn’t hesitate to use it on them either.

“Just… put the gun down,” she continued, stepping forward. “You can hold onto it if you like, no one’s gonna take it from you, but just put it down so we can talk.”

“Talk,” the man said. “You want to talk?”

She nodded. “Yeah. Nothing else. Just talk.”

When he laughed, Martha almost flinched. “That’s all you’ve been doing, talking, and how’s that helped us so far?”

Martha paused, swallowed, and thought about what on earth she could possibly say to this man to calm him down. She’d gotten so good at telling one story, at invigorating the people with one set of words, that another one was hard to come by. She never had been very good at speeches.

“It hasn’t,” she admitted at last. “But that doesn’t mean it won’t.”

But the man clearly didn’t want to hear her anymore, he’d clearly had enough. He was already turning away from her, ready to rage his own war against the Toclefane and the Master and their cruelty, but Martha wasn’t about to let him. She wasn’t about to let him hurt _anyone_ , and that included himself.

“Listen!” she said. She took another step. “I _know_ the Doctor, I traveled with him for a _year_ , and in all that time, he never let one person down. Even when it was his own life in danger, he never stopped, he never gave up, an’ he never ran away. ‘Cause that’s what he does. He helps people. That’s why the Master has him locked up, because he knows what the Doctor can do, he’s _scared_ of what the Doctor can do, and he’s right to be scared!”

Martha’s eyes sought the man’s, willing him to look at her, and finally, he did. She was close now, just two feet away from him. Almost close enough to take the gun away. “I know the countdown seems like a long way off,” she said softly, continuing to close the distance between them, “and it is. It’s too long, too long to see more an’ more people get slaughtered an’ hear the Master’s music track of the day, too long to put up with this! But we have to. Because the countdown, the day when all of this ends, _is_ coming. The Master _brags_ about that day, never knowing, never suspecting, what the Doctor can do.

“All we need to do,” she said, and she was right in front of him now, her eyes boring into his, “is have hope.” She gently placed her hands on top of the gun, the bottoms of her palms pressing on his clenched, shaking hands. “Please. Just put the gun down.”

For a moment, it seemed like he would. Martha could see it in his watery eyes, in the way his jaw lowered, his breathing hitched. And then the moment was gone. The man was screaming “No!” and wrenching the gun and his hands out of her grasp and whirling away from her and shooting out into the crowd. Martha stood there, frozen, as some people rushed forward to subdue him—other members of the Resistance, she’d later come to learn. Only dully did the screams and cries of the terrified begin to register with her, and then she was on the move, eyes scanning for a possible victim. Upon finding her, Martha rushed over, shoving through would-be helpers or panicking strangers to examine the body.

The victim was a girl, probably still a teenager, with blond hair and a face so thin not even a model would have envied her. She had probably been gorgeous once, perhaps with a beautiful singing voice, a coy flirting glance, some move she did just so with her hand. Certainly she’d had a boyfriend, probably several, and maybe even a first love. Maybe he wasn’t even dead. And maybe this girl had actually liked school, maybe she was gifted with looks and brains. Maybe history bored the hell out of her while math was her thing, maybe she’d planned to attend college and get a degree and help people, just like Martha. Maybe she would have made a difference.

She had a bullet wound in her chest, close to the sternum, just beneath the ribs. Martha checked her breathing, her pulse. Damn it, not good, no air flow. Martha glanced at the wound, saw that surprisingly little blood was leaking out but knew that meant nothing, especially not with the girl on her back. There was no time to check for an exit wound or the extent of the damage. She began CPR: two breaths, fifteen chest compressions, two breaths, fifteen chest compressions. She was on her first set of compressions when someone pulled her away.

“What’re you doing, I have to help her!” Martha screamed, struggling as hard as she could, “I have to help, let me go!”

“The Toclefane are about to come, an’ we need to get you out of here!” a voice in her ear hissed, still pulling her back through the shell-shocked crowd. Martha kept struggling. “Stop it! We’ll get someone to take care of the girl, but right now we need to get you safe.”

Martha spent a night in the cellar of some nearby building surrounded by Resistance members, not sleeping but staying as still and as silent as she could, the girl’s blood still on her hands and the threat of the Toclefane on all their minds. Later, she found out the girl’s name was Sarah and that she had never taken another breath after Martha had left. Even if she had stayed, chances were she would not have been able to save the girl anyway.

It was the first time her story, the Doctor’s story, had killed.

Now, leaning against a tree in the near-dark, she could still feel the sharp press of that girl’s chin, the skin, still warm, the clothing, far too rough and solid for anyone to be wearing. She still saw the man, the look in his eyes. She could still smell his breath, could still feel the metal and his cold flesh beneath her hands. In that moment, she could have taken the gun away.

Taking a deep breath, Martha squeezed her eyes shut and willed the memories away. She actually felt like she was shoving something back, struggling with a crazed beast, a feral alien in one of her and the Doctor’s mad adventures, and she was heaving that beast behind a thick steel door with bolts and chains and many locks, just to keep it at bay. Then, after a few more deep breaths, after images of the Doctor aged and Jack screaming through static came back to her unbidden, after she could practically hear the Doctor's voice and feel his warm breath at her ear, she was able to move.

Pushing herself away from the bark of the tree, Martha took a few steps forward. She flexed her hands and blinked her eyes, took a few more deep breaths and tried another step, looked herself up and down. Good, her throat wasn’t choked up anymore and her hands had stopped shaking. Once again, she was all right.

With a determined set to her jaw, Martha crossed her arms and moved onward, squinting against the breeze that found its way into the trees. She had a job to do and it was time she got back to it.

Martha Jones only had two months to finish saving the world.


End file.
